No other writer gets the heat, the chaos, the shimmering otherness of the East quite like Penticton’s Adam Lewis Schroeder. His second novel, In the Fabled East, is a witty romp through colonial Indochina that focuses on two French nationals separated by time and gender. Pierre Lazarie, freshly minted Sorbonne Oriental Studies graduate, arrives in Saigon in 1936. Adélie Tremier, a consumptive beauty, precedes Pierre’s arrival by 27 years, whereupon she vanishes.

“Too shrill, too hot, too utterly baffling” is Pierre’s indelible first impression of Saigon. As he enthusiastically imagines academic articles on such subjects as “The Over-saturation of Rickshaws in Saigon and Environs,” a telegram arrives: His fiancée has dumped him. A naïf, no doubt, but a survivor too: Pierre won 6,000 francs gambling on board ship, a feat that mightily impresses Henri Le Dallic, his 44- year-old colleague.

Detailed to trace the missing Frenchwoman, Pierre and the dissolute Henri, the Messrs. Yin and Yang of road trips, embark on a grand adventure. Their hunt for the long-lost Adélie — her grown son having made the request in person — leads them into strange territory indeed.

Whereas Pierre falls immediately in love with the idea of their mystery woman, Henri sardonically soldiers on, driven by the search for whatever constitutes the local alcoholic beverage. Along the Mekong River, Pierre angrily confronts youthful plantation owners with their “silver cigarette cases, gold fillings, and shoes so glossy I might have shaved in them.” As he informs them that far from having no record of land ownership, Vietnam’s “Imperial Court at Hué kept exact records since the rise of the quan dien system in 14 . . . ” he is interrupted by Henri’s shout: “Chase the tourists from the buffet!”

Around donnish Pierre and old Indochina hand Henri, Schroeder weaves the tale of Adélie, a heroine among misfits and scoundrels. Her richly drawn life is marked by grotesque events, starting with the murder of her 3-year-old brother by a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War. In Paris, this terminally ill mother hears about a Shangri-La, a healing spring in Laos. Spitting blood, she embarks to find it: Only her survival will save her son from her in-laws’ military addiction.

Absurd? Mais oui. But Adélie steals the show with her determination and unblinking comprehension of what’s happening to her. In 1909, abandoned in the jungles of Laos, she observes: “The puddle of blood and mucus, only a hand’s-breath from her face, coursed with the wings of insects wading and leaping like children at the seaside.” She muses philosophically on sex and death: “Perhaps approaching ecstasy and approaching death were not so different.” The woman beguiles even as she dissolves.

Schroeder, like his creation Pierre, is one very shrewd card player. When cynicism, climate and lost souls threaten his narrative, he calmly deals a fresh hand. We are as astonished by Henri’s sudden bravery in saving a child from a lethal tiger attack. We are moved by Pierre’s wrenching encounter with parents who have sold their daughter in a futile attempt to pay French taxes. As this road-trip draws to a close, the exhausted Pierre is told the big news: Charlie Chaplin is visiting Angkor — shades of Angelina Jolie, a half century later.

Changes in rhythm and place are constants in his intriguing tale, but Schroeder’s drama is particularly gripping when the fabulous collides with the real in the novel’s final hundred-odd pages: the marching boots of a century’s endless wars intrude on the timeless village where Adélie has found succour. (Spoiler alert: these scenes are better than Lost.)

The year is now 1954. French citizens still in Indochina, Pierre among them, notice their wounded soldiers being spirited away to Massachusetts for treatment. The Americans are arriving. The French have been defeated at Dien Bien Phu. Adélie’s adored son, now a grizzled warrior, has survived this latest battle among the countless he has fought. Schroeder’s last scenes play out in a city on the brink, where daft colonial administrators preoccupy themselves with what to wear this week’s costume ball.

In a tremendously satisfying dénouement, our principal players are united partly by war, partly by the dissolution of empire, but mainly by a mother-and-child reunion — the dimensions of which can only be imagined within the pages of this marvelous and compelling tale.

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